Thomas, Norman (1884–1968)

Norman Thomas, six-time Socialist Party presidential candidate, was arguably the most important American Socialist leader in the late 1920s through the early 1950s. He presided over a declining socialist movement amid the upheavals of the Great Depression, World War II, and the beginning of the Cold War, to which he tried to bring to bear a democratic socialist program rooted in gradualism, consensual politics, and an ethical critique of capitalism. Although he never managed to make his party into a major political force, his ethical vision, his campaigns for peace and racial justice, and his passionate anti-communist witness inspired many throughout the center-left.

Thomas's socialism was rooted in his Christian faith. The son, grandson, and great-grandson of Christian ministers, he was brought up in the fold of the Presbyterian Church and educated at Princeton University and Union Theological Seminary. While at the Union Seminary in the 1910s, he fell under the influence of the leading Social Gospel theologian of the time, Rev. Walter Rauschenbusch, and he embraced Rauschenbusch's so-called kingdom theology. This theology redefined the orthodox Christian faith in terms of Christ's ethical teaching, and its adherents insisted that the Christian believer was to join socialists, labor unionists, and social workers in purposive social renovation. Through their joint efforts, these social activists were to gradually usher in the cooperative, economically just society that the Social Gospellers regarded as the prophesized kingdom of God on earth.

Convinced of the truth of these tenets and after his ordination in 1911, Thomas embarked on a lifelong attempt at translating them into individual and corporate action. First he tried his hand as a settlement worker at the Spring Street Settlement in Manhattan and then as an assistant pastor at several tenement-district Presbyterian churches in New York City. Eventually, he became a minister in East Harlem. His encounter with urban poverty in Harlem convinced Thomas that a “Christianized” social system could come only through a complete, if peaceful, overthrow of the existing capitalist order. He refused to join the Socialist Party, however, since he feared that its program would lead to a stultifying bureaucratic attempt at premature change.

Thomas reacted to the outbreak of World War I by becoming a vocal pacifist and a campaigner for the rights of conscientious objectors. In 1918, he became secretary to the leading Christian pacifist organization, the Fellowship for Reconciliation, editor of its journal The World Tomorrow, and an activist in the No-Conscription League, the American Union Against Militarism, and the Civil Liberties Bureau (the future American Civil Liberties Union). These activities landed him on a federal list of suspected subversives, and his presbytery was turned [Page 1378]against him. Already increasingly critical of the churches' limited social engagement, Thomas chose to resign his ministry in 1917. He continued his work in the Fellowship for Reconciliation and eventually helped to transform this Christian pacifist group into a major, multi-issue movement for social justice.

More and more convinced that only a socialist transformation of society could end war and produce social justice, Thomas now joined the Socialist Party, as well. He began his party work in 1922 as codirector of the Intercollegiate Socialist Society. Later renamed the League for Industrial Democracy, this organization disseminated socialist theories among college and university students, and its aim was to form a generation of activists who would work with labor union and Socialist Party leaders to transform all areas of American life. Thomas took a central role, too, in the attempt to create a broad coalition labor and progressive party that led to Senator Robert M. LaFollette's Conference for Progressive Political Action. This group, which the Socialist Party endorsed in the 1924 presidential elections, did not become a permanent political force, but its demise did not dishearten Thomas. He would continue his search for a coalition labor party for the rest of his political career.

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